Chapter 6

Oliver didn't answer right away. He looked past her for a moment, toward the wall, toward nothing in particular, the way people do when a memory catches them off guard and drags them somewhere they didn't plan on going.

"I had a sister," he said finally, quiet, careful with the word, as if speaking it too fast might break something loose he wasn't ready to feel.

Liana's breath caught. She opened her mouth, some instinct in her already reaching toward him, wanting to ask her name, ask what happened, ask anything at all that might ease whatever had just crossed his face.

"Oliver," she started.

But he was already turning away, already moving toward the door with the same controlled stillness he wore like armor, and whatever door had cracked open in him for those few seconds was already closing again before she could get a single word through it.

"Get some rest," he said, not looking back. "It's been a long night."

The door shut quietly behind him, and Liana was left alone in the room with the question still sitting unanswered on her tongue.

Oliver walked the length of the hallway without seeing any of it, past the guards who straightened when he passed, past the closed doors of rooms he hadn't set foot in for years, until he reached his own and shut it firmly behind him, the click of the lock the only sound in the silence.

He stood there for a long moment, back against the door, eyes closed, breathing slow and even, the way he had trained himself to breathe through anything, pain, fury, loss, all of it folded down into something manageable, something he could carry without it showing on his face.

It never worked the way it used to. Not with this.

He crossed the room to the small shelf near the window and picked up the frame resting there, worn smooth at the edges from all the times he had held it and set it back down again over the years. Emily, sixteen, laughing at something just out of frame, her hair caught mid motion, forever paused in a moment that had no idea what was coming for her.

"I don't have the right," he said quietly, to the empty room, to the photograph, to no one who could answer him. "After everything I've done. Everything I've become. I don't have the right to call myself your brother anymore."

His jaw tightened, and for a moment the composure he wore so easily in front of everyone else slipped entirely, just him and the photograph and years of a silence he had never once let anyone see.

"I kill people when I have to," he said, voice low, rough at the edges. "I destroy them when I have to. I've taken apart entire operations, entire families, without losing a single hour of sleep over it." He set the frame down slowly, his fingers lingering against the glass. "And I still haven't found the one person who took you from me."

He sat on the edge of the bed, elbows braced against his knees, head bowed, the way he never allowed himself to sit in front of anyone else.

"You'd hate what I've become," he murmured. "You always said I was too controlling. Too careful. You should see me now."

For a long time he said nothing else, the rain picking up outside the window, tapping softly against the glass, the only sound in a room that held more grief than anyone in his world ever suspected he carried.

Then his phone buzzed against the nightstand.

He almost didn't look at it. Almost let it ring itself into silence the way he usually did with anything that wasn't urgent enough to interrupt this particular hour of the night.

Something made him pick it up anyway.

The message was short. Four words, from a number he hadn't seen in over a year, one he had long since assumed had gone dark for good.

I know who did it.

Oliver stared at the screen, his whole body going very still, the grief on his face sharpening instantly into something else entirely.